The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

517 Pages·2018·18.8 MB·English

by  Andrew Delbanco

“The great value of Andrew Delbanco’s interpretively edifying The War Before the War is in centering the
cause of the great irrepressible conflict of 1860 in the many hearts and minds of otherwise indifferent,
sympathetic, uncertain northern men and women who finally found enforced complicity in the South’s
‘peculiar institution’ intolerable and a war for human ideals inescapable.”
—David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography
“Timely, incisive, deeply researched, The War Before the War tells the vital story of fugitive slaves, whose
courageous defiance forced the young nation to reckon with its primal horror. Delbanco’s swift-moving yet
powerfully nuanced narrative offers insights into the institution of slavery and the political maneuvering
that led up to the Civil War. This book is essential reading today, at a historical moment that demands
unflinching reflection on founding truths.”
—Elizabeth D. Samet, author of Soldier’s Heart and editor of The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
“In The War Before the War, one of America’s most eloquent scholars draws readers into the compelling
story of how the North-South struggle over runaway slaves prepared the way for the Civil War. From the
making of the Constitution to the bloodbath that began at Fort Sumter, Andrew Delbanco captures the
experience of escaped slaves as they forced white Americans to confront the cruelties of slavery. This is a
political, legal, and, above all, human story with powerful resonance today.”
—Dan T. Carter, author of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South
BY ANDREW DELBANCO
College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be
Melville: His World and Work
The Real American Dream
Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now
The Death of Satan
The Puritan Ordeal
William Ellery Channing

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ISBN: 9781594204050 (hardcover) ISBN: 9780525560302 (ebook)
Version_1
To Ben and Raina, Yvonne and Emilia, and, always,
for Dawn
“To love and live beloved is the soul’s paradise”
CONTENTS
Praise for The War Before The War
By Andrew Delbanco
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
Part One
THE LONG FUSE
1. THE PROBLEM
2. SLAVERY AND THE FOUNDERS
3. A COMPROMISED CONSTITUTION
4. THE FIRST TEST
5. CAUGHT
6. WAR OF WORDS
7. INTO THE COURTS
Part Two
THE FUSE IS LIT
8. TO THE BRINK
9. STATE OF THE UNION
10. THE LAST TRUCE
11. EXPLOSION
12. TRIALS OF CONSCIENCE
13. THE END OF COMPROMISE
14. “AND THE WAR CAME”
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
Notes
Index
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
IN NOVEMBER 1863, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to
honor the thousands of men and boys who had died there four months before.
In what became the most famous speech in American history, he consecrated the
battlefield in the name of a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.” For most Americans, and for much
of the world, those words have attained the status of scripture. They were,
however, not strictly true, and Lincoln knew it.
Five years earlier, he had been more candid. Speaking in Chicago in the
summer of 1858, he noted that when the Republic was founded, “we had slavery
among us,” and that “we could not get our constitution unless we permitted”
slavery to persist in those parts of the nation where it was already entrenched.
“We could not secure the good we did secure,” he said, “if we grasped for
more.” The United States, in other words, could not have been created if the
eradication of slavery had been a condition of its creation. Had Lincoln said at
Gettysburg that the nation was conceived not in liberty but in compromise, the
phrase would have been less memorable but more accurate.
The hard truth is that the United States was founded in an act of
accommodation between two fundamentally different societies. As one southern-
born antislavery activist later wrote, it was a “sad satire to call [the] States
‘United,’” because in one-half of the country slavery was basic to its way of life
while in the other it was fading or already gone. The founding fathers tried to
stitch these two nations together with no idea how long the stitching would hold.
For nearly a century, the two halves of the so-called United States coexisted
relatively peacefully. In its early decades, the young republic was little more
than a business consortium dependent on interstate trade and central financing
for infrastructure improvements. Countless transactions took place between
North and South without incident. Southern planters supplied northern textile
mills with slave-grown cotton, while northern banks supplied southern planters
with financial capital. Inhabitants of one section regularly crossed over into the
with financial capital. Inhabitants of one section regularly crossed over into the
other. The sight of white southerners with their black maids or valets was
common in the streets of northern cities and towns.
This book tells the story of how that composite nation came apart. There were
many reasons for the unraveling, but one in particular exposed the idea of the
“united” states as a lie. This was the fact that enslaved black people, against long
odds, repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of
freedom in the North. Fugitives from slavery ripped open the screen behind
which America tried to conceal the reality of life for black Americans, most of
whom lived in the South, out of sight and out of mind for most people in the
North. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery
was a benign institution and the reality that a nation putatively based on the
principle of human equality was actually a prison house in which millions of
Americans had virtually no rights at all. By awakening northerners to this grim
fact, and by enraging southerners who demanded the return of their “absconded”
property, fugitive slaves pushed the nation toward confronting the truth about
itself. They incited conflict in the streets, the courts, the press, the halls of
Congress, and perhaps most important in the minds and hearts of Americans
who had been oblivious to their plight. This manifold conflict—under way long
before the first shots were fired in the Civil War—was the war before the war.
—
THE PROBLEM OF FUGITIVE slaves loomed over the Republic from the start. Many
of the founding fathers were slave owners themselves, including Thomas
Jefferson and George Washington, whose own slaves periodically ran away. The
founders made an effort to solve the problem in Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 of
the Constitution, which came to be known (although it referred to indentured
servants as well as to slaves) as the fugitive slave clause:
No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws
thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or
Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but
shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or
Labour may be due.
But stating this principle proved to be much easier than carrying it out.
Although from the southern point of view, law-abiding citizens were obliged to
return a runaway slave just as if they had come upon stray cattle or stolen cash,